Open Seminar: The Letters of Chion and Themistocles

Location: Greek Centre, Mezzanine, 168 Lonsdale Street, Melbourne
Date: 11/5/2017 @ 7:00pm
Presenter: John Penwill
Entry: FREE

Synopsis

This lecture will take a close look at two collections of letters, neither of which is highly regarded by the academic community: The Letters of Chion (hereafter LC) purport to be a set of letters home by a young man on his way to Athens to study in Plato’s Academy and the effect his time there has on his political judgement when it comes to deciding what to do about the dictatorship in his native city, Heraclea, following a successful coup d’état during his absence.

The Letters of Themistocles (hereafter LT) likewise focus on an individual protagonist prominent in Athenian politics about a century earlier, and like the LC purport to be a set of letters written to a selection of friends and enemies in his home city and elsewhere following his ostracism in 471 BCE.

Both texts use the epistolary form to explore the character and motivation of their protagonist, but do so in very different ways: all letters bar one of the LC are addressed to Chion’s father Matris, whereas in the LT the recipients come from a range of individuals and locations.

But in both cases what we are clearly dealing with is a carefully constructed and thought-provoking text, and one that is at least one grade of sophistication above the essays on such topics which students were required to compose in the schools of rhetoric that abounded in the first and second centuries CE.

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